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Microsoft's xCloud Game Streaming Looks Worse On Linux Than Windows
by Peter Reutemann 07 Jul '22

07 Jul '22

'As noted by a Reddit user and confirmed by Ars Technica, Microsoft's xCloud game streaming looks noticeable worse when running on Linux than Windows. From the report: With the Linux User-Agent, edges are generally less sharp and colors are a little more washed out. The difference is even more apparent if you zoom in on the Forza logo and menu text, which shows a significant reduction in clarity. Interestingly, the dip in quality seems to go away if you enable "Clarity Boost, an Edge-exclusive feature that "provid[es] the optimal look and feel while playing Xbox games from the cloud," according to Microsoft. That's great for Linux users who switched over to Microsoft Edge when it launched on Linux last November. But Linux users who stick with Firefox, Chrome, or other browsers are currently stuck with apparently reduced streaming quality. That Linux quality dip has led some to speculate that Microsoft is trying to reserve the best xCloud streaming performance for Windows machines in an attempt to attract more users to its own operating system. But using a Macintosh User-Agent string provides streaming performance similar to that on Windows, which would seem to be a big omission if that theory were true. Microsoft also hasn't published any kind of "best on Windows"-style marketing in promoting xCloud streaming, which would seemingly be a key component of trying to attract new Windows users. (The quality difference could be a roundabout attempt to get Linux users to switch to the Edge browser, where Clarity Boost offers the best possible quality. But that still wouldn't fully explain why Windows users on other browsers, without Clarity Boost, also get better streaming quality than their Linux brethren.) Others have suggested that the downgrade could simply be a bug caused by Microsoft's naive parsing of the User-Agent strings. That's because the User-Agent strings for Android browsers generally identify themselves as some version of Linux ("Linux; Android 11; HD1905," for example). Microsoft's xCloud code might simply see the "Linux" in that string, assume the user is running Android, then automatically throttle the streaming quality to account for the (presumably) reduced screen size of an Android phone or tablet. ' -- source: https://games.slashdot.org/story/22/07/06/2040206 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 (office) +64 (7) 577-5304 (home office) https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Systemd Creator Lands At Microsoft
by Peter Reutemann 07 Jul '22

07 Jul '22

'Yesterday, Phoronix reported that the lead developer of systemd, Lennart Poettering, left Red Hat. "It turns out he had joined Microsoft and [is] continuing his work on systemd," writes Phoronix's Michael Larabel in a new report. He continues: While some may not always align with his views or approaches to handling some things, there is no overstating his enormous contributions to the Linux/open-source world and his dedication to advancing the ecosystem over the years. This may take many by surprise but let's not forget Microsoft has over time employed a number of Linux developers and other prominent open-source developers... Microsoft currently employs Python creator Guido van Rossum, GNOME creator Miguel de Icaza had been employed by Microsoft from 2016 when they acquired Xamarin to earlier this year when he left, Nat Friedman as part of Xamarin-Microsoft served as GitHub CEO following Microsoft's acquisition, Gentoo Linux founder Daniel Robbins was previously employed by Microsoft, Steve French as the Linux CIFS/SMB2/SMB3 maintainer and Samba team member works for Microsoft, and Microsoft employs/previously-employed a large number of upstream Linux developers like Matteo Croce, Matthew Wilcox, Shyam Prasad N, Michael Kelley, and many others beyond just the usual immediately recognizable names to Linux enthusiasts/developers. It was also just earlier this year that Christian Brauner as another longtime Linux kernel developer joined Microsoft. Christian Brauner is Berlin-based like Lennart and moved on to Microsoft after the past half-decade at Canonical working on the Linux kernel, LXC, systemd, and more. ' -- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/22/07/06/2348255 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 (office) +64 (7) 577-5304 (home office) https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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PulseAudio and Systemd Creator, Lennart Poettering, Reportedly Leaves Red Hat
by Peter Reutemann 06 Jul '22

06 Jul '22

'To much surprise, the lead developer of systemd Lennart Poettering who also led the creation of PulseAudio, Avahi, and has been a prolific free software contributor has reportedly left Red Hat. Michael Larabel writes via Phoronix: So far no public announcement appears to have been made, but according to a source has been reportedly removed from Red Hat's internal employee database. Yesterday Lennart did comment on the public Fedora devel mailing list to having now created a personal Red Hat Bugzilla account for his Fedora contributions after it was raised in bug reports and brought up on the mailing list that Lennart's Red Hat account is disabled. Emailing his Red Hat address this morning indeed yields an auto-response that it's no longer in use. He's still active in systemd world with new commits made as of today, so it will be interesting to see where he ends up or his next moves with his vast Linux ecosystem expertise and pivotal role in spearheading systemd's direction. ' -- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/22/07/05/2040215 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 (office) +64 (7) 577-5304 (home office) https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Gtk 5 Might Drop X.11 Support, Says GNOME Dev
by Peter Reutemann 06 Jul '22

06 Jul '22

'One of the GNOME developers has suggested that the next major release of Gtk could drop support for the X window system. The Register reports: Emmanuele Bassi opened a discussion last week on the GNOME project's Gitlab instance that asked whether the developers could drop X.11 support in the next release of Gtk. At this point, it is only a suggestion, but if it gets traction, this could significantly accelerate the move to the Wayland display server and the end of X.11. Don't panic: Gtk 5 is not imminent. Gtk is a well-established toolkit, originally designed for the GIMP bitmap editing program back in 1998. Gtk 4 arrived relatively recently, shortly before the release of GNOME 40 in 2021. GNOME 40 has new user-interface guidelines, and as a part of this, Gtk 4 builds GNOME's Adwaita theme into the toolkit by means of the new libadwaita library, which is breaking the appearance of some existing apps. Also, to be fair, as we recently covered, the X window system is very old now and isn't seeing major changes, although new releases of parts of it do still happen. This discussion is almost certain to get wildly contentious, and the thread on Gitlab has been closed to further comments for now. If this idea gains traction, one likely outcome might well be a fork of Gtk, just as happened when GNOME 3 came out. [...] A lot of the features of the current version, X.11, are no longer used or relevant to most users. Even so, X.12 is barely even in the planning stages yet.' -- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/22/07/05/2110211 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 (office) +64 (7) 577-5304 (home office) https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Vim 9.0 Released
by Peter Reutemann 05 Jul '22

05 Jul '22

'After many years of gradual improvement Vim now takes a big step with a major release. Besides many small additions the spotlight is on a new incarnation of the Vim script language: Vim9 script. Why Vim9 script: A new script language, what is that needed for? Vim script has been growing over time, while preserving backwards compatibility. That means bad choices from the past often can't be changed and compatibility with Vi restricts possible solutions. Execution is quite slow, each line is parsed every time it is executed. The main goal of Vim9 script is to drastically improve performance. This is accomplished by compiling commands into instructions that can be efficiently executed. An increase in execution speed of 10 to 100 times can be expected. A secondary goal is to avoid Vim-specific constructs and get closer to commonly used programming languages, such as JavaScript, TypeScript and Java. The performance improvements can only be achieved by not being 100% backwards compatible. For example, making function arguments available by creating an "a:" dictionary involves quite a lot of overhead. In a Vim9 function this dictionary is not available. Other differences are more subtle, such as how errors are handled. For those with a large collection of legacy scripts: Not to worry! They will keep working as before. There are no plans to drop support for legacy script. No drama like with the deprecation of Python 2.' -- source: https://developers.slashdot.org/story/22/07/04/193233 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 (office) +64 (7) 577-5304 (home office) https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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no more scrolling...
by Peter Reutemann 05 Jul '22

05 Jul '22

Hi everyone Been working on a Rasperry Pi without graphical user interface and simply log in on the command-line. One thing that has been puzzling me is why I can no longer scroll backwards/forwards using SHIFT+PGUP/PGDOWN. Instead I have to use "| less" on output now. Turns out that this functionality got removed from the kernel: https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/slackware-14/the-latest-kernel-rel… Not every device will have a graphical user interface, especially not IoT devices. So that's rather annoying... :-( Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 (office) +64 (7) 577-5304 (home office) https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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USB installer tool removes Windows 11’s Microsoft account requirements (and more)
by Peter Reutemann 05 Jul '22

05 Jul '22

'One of the new "features" coming to the Windows 11 22H2 update is a Microsoft account requirement for all new installs, regardless of whether you are using the Home or Pro version of the operating system. And that's too bad, because the 22H2 update corrects a few of Windows 11's original shortcomings while adding some nice quality-of-life improvements. An easy workaround for this requirement is the Rufus USB formatting tool, which can create USB install media for Windows and all kinds of other operating systems. Rufus has already offered some flags to remove Windows 11's system requirement checks from the installer, removing the need for clunky Windows Registry edits and other workarounds. But the beta of version 3.19 will also remove the Microsoft account requirement for new installs, making it easy to set up a new Windows PC with a traditional local account. When setting up Windows 11, make sure not to connect your PC to the Internet before creating your user account. This trick worked to circumvent the Microsoft account requirement in Windows 11 Pro and some of the later versions of Windows 10 but is being removed entirely from Windows 11 22H2. The Rufus tool merely reverts to the pre-22H2 status quo.' -- source: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/06/usb-installer-tool-removes-windows-… Nice to see open-source "fixing" this mandatory account issue. :-) Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 (office) +64 (7) 577-5304 (home office) https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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The tiniest Raspberry Pi gets a new version with built-in Wi-Fi
by Peter Reutemann 04 Jul '22

04 Jul '22

'The Raspberry Pi Zero series is the smallest version of the popular single-board computer that most people have experience with, but there's one Pi that's even smaller: the Raspberry Pi Pico. Launched in January of 2021 for just $4, the Pico's RP2040 microcontroller incorporates a pair of 133MHz Arm Cortex-M0+ CPU cores and 264 kilobytes (not megabytes) of memory. The low specs and low price make it well-suited for single-purpose devices that don't need much processing power instead of running general-purpose software like the larger Pi boards. To help support companies who want to use the Pico as a basis for Internet-connected smart devices, the Raspberry Pi Foundation is introducing a few new variants of the Pico today. The most notable, the Raspberry Pi Pico W, adds built-in Wi-Fi connectivity to the board while increasing the price from $4 to $6.' -- source: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/06/the-tiniest-raspberry-pi-gets-a-new… Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 (office) +64 (7) 577-5304 (home office) https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Open-Standard Audio/MIDI plugins: A Dose Of CLAP
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 01 Jul '22

01 Jul '22

Music/audio production tools commonly support plugins to augment their capabilities. However, well-supported plugin architectures have mostly been proprietary. For example, Steinberg’s VST2 is strictly controlled via a proprietary licence. They are now promoting VST3, which is being made available under the GPL, but their (mis)handling of the VST2→VST3 transition has left a bad taste in many developers’ mouths. On Linux, you will likely heard of open-source plugin systems like LADSPA, DSSI and LV2. And also JUCE and GMPI. Of these, LV2 seems like the most popular, but developers report that it can be hard to get to grips with. Here is a backgrounder <https://lwn.net/Articles/890272/> by Alexandre Prokoudine on the current state of play, leading up to the introduction of Yet Another Plugin Standard, the “Clever Audio Plugin”, or “CLAP” (fnarr-fnarr). He goes into more detail in the followup <https://lwn.net/Articles/893048/>. And he has a bunch of more info on his own site <https://librearts.org/2022/06/introducing-clap/>.

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Mycroft’s Mimic 3 -- A Privacy-Focused, Open-Source Text-To-Speech Engine
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 30 Jun '22

30 Jun '22

Just came across this video <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=egrMopDIvPE> on the “Learn Linux TV” channel, talking about this new device that does text to speech. The actual speech-synthesis software is open-source. The original “Mimic1” has been around for a while, but the new version takes advantage of newer Raspberry π hardware. He talks about it not needing an Internet connection any more: I think this was a requirement of the old hardware, not the software as such. You can build and install the software (old or new) yourself, it’s freely available from their GitHub repos. Interesting that the build instructions for Microsoft Windows recommend doing a cross-build from Linux, this being faster than a native Windows build.

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